aril 2016 digest future of mobile page 05...

UNDERSTANDINGTHE PILL AR S OF

MOBILE M A R K E T I N G

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PAGE 11

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Motive for Doing Mobile Marketing

Mining Mobile Marketing

ARIL 2016

FUTURE OF MOBILE MARKETING 2016

Digest

From R es e a rc h to Pract ice

HELLOver the past few years, B2B marketing has moved toward adopting digital technology, and CMOs have worked hard at creating a successful marketing recipe by complementing old marketing tricks with newer digital tools.

As the industry evolved, these CMOs acquired significant knowledge and experience from which we could benefit. With the Digital CMO Digest, we aim to do exactly this: share their stories and ideas with everyone and get people to talk about them.

We also hope to bring to you a practitioner’s perspective to some of the important research studies done globally in the digital space.

In this first issue, we talk about different facets of mobile marketing in the B2B space, and how marketers have worked around mobile tools to fit their marketing strategies. Our publisher, Regalix, researched the use of mobile marketing by B2B marketers and results of that study revealed some emerging trends (a brief summary of the study is provided in this issue). We reached out to a few CMOs to talk about these trends and how important the mobile platform is for them.

We have packed this issue with other interesting content as well, including a section on books and an analyst corner.Enjoy!

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Arunh KrishnanEditor

01 | FUTURE OF MOBILE MARKETING | APRIL 2016

STATE OF B2B MOBILE MARKETING 2015

UNDERSTANDING THE PILLARS OFMOBILE MARKETING

MOTIVE FOR DOING MOBILE MARKETING

DO YOU TRUST ME?BRAND’S CREDIBILITYHERALDS SUCCESS OF ITSMOBILE MARKETING

MINING MOBILE MARKETING

BOOK CORNER

CONTRIBUTING WRITER

Avanish TiwaryAvanish is an independent journalist who writes

on business strategies. Previously, he was a start-up reporter at The Financial Express.

DESIGNER

Priyokumar Singh NaoremPriyo is a senior designer at Regalix.

ARTIST

Paramesh JoladParamesh is an artist who enjoys working in

both the realistic and abstract style of painting. He loves working with water color. Featured in

this issue are a set of water color works that he has created exclusively for us on the subject of

digital transformation.

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ARIL 2016

S TAT E O F B 2 B M O B I L E

M A R K E T I N G 2 0 1 5The world is going mobile, but B2B marketers are still lagging behind. According to the ‘State of B2B Mobile Marketing 2015’ survey by Regalix Inc., almost half of the surveyed marketers aren’t investing in mobile marketing.

Even where companies have invested in a mobile marketing strategy, the survey found 67% have done so only in the last 2 years, and only 5% have had strategies for longer than 3 years. Understandably, then, most organizations are still struggling for effectiveness, with only 10% rating their mobile marketing strategy as ‘very effective’. The survey of B2B marketers was conducted across a mix of service and product companies, with a little over half the companies being located in the US.

The survey found that most organizations are yet to infuse sufficient depth and scope into their mobile marketing strategies. Only 33% of marketers collect their own data on customer mobile preferences and behavior. When understanding mobile preferences, companies stick to the most basic data points, focusing on device type, operating system, social media usage and location.

Similarly, mobile marketing tactics tend to be focused on the mobile website and mobile app, with tactics like location-based services and m-commerce being virtually ignored.

B2B marketers tend to see mobile marketing as a strategy for engaging with existing customers and have yet to use it to evolve strategies for acquiring a larger consumer base.

Many organizations have yet to adequately decipher the mobile user journey: for 71% of organizations, website traffic from mobile phones is less than 25%, and for 72% of organizations, revenue generated through mobile is below 10%.

Most importantly, a whopping 73% of marketers said they could not measure the effectiveness of

their mobile marketing strategies on an ROI basis.

These gaps in understanding, along with a lack of budget, are the primary mobile marketing challenges that marketers need to overcome.

With most research showing that mobile devices have moved from being merely social tools to integral business platforms, B2B marketers have to work at catching up with the technology curve.

*Source: State of B2B Mobile Marketing 2015 APRIL 2016 | FUTURE OF MOBILE MARKETING | 04

The world is mobile, but B2B marketers haven’t got there yet.*

UNDERSTANDING THE PILLARS OF MOBILE MARKETING

Mobile, which has come to play a significant role in the consumer segment, is slowly nudging its way into B2B marketing and creating its own space. As mobile becomes more relevant within the B2B framework, marketers need to see how they can effectively integrate it with their overall marketing plan.

The Regalix study on the usage of mobile as a marketing tool revealed interesting insights, use cases and new trends in mobile marketing. While keeping our eye on the survey results, we talked to R. Sudarshan, CMO at Dell, to find out how he sees mobile marketing and what Dell has achieved through the mobile platform.

In this exclusive interview with Digital CMO Digest, Sudarshan accepts that Dell could have started mobile marketing much earlier. He talks about some of the biggest challenges in B2B mobile marketing, new developments that will shape this space, and the importance of knowing customers using mobile data.


R. Sudarshan, Commercial Marketing Head, Dell India.

Q1. When and how did mobile become important in B2B marketing for you?We started a year and a half ago, and the reason we started it was that we found that the time spent by people online, looking at their IT purchasing decisions, was dramatically increasing. Customers who were spending 4 hours a week online a couple of years ago are spending more than 5.5 hours today. When we looked at the data closely, we found that almost all the jump was coming from mobile.

The perceived importance of mobile in B2B marketing has dramatically shifted in the last two years.

Q2. How has the industry adapted to the ways of mobile marketing?I believe it’s all about the intent. The principle that we acquired, and others should too, is, we said whatever we have done so far is good, but let’s start afresh. Let’s look at it from the point of where the industry is going, what customers’ preferences are and how have those changed. The biggest challenge is not the tool, not the budget, not the capability, it is the intent.

Most of the large corporations are getting there. And a lot of start-ups are demonstrating that it is not difficult nor expensive to adapt to mobile. The shift is automatically happening. We will have to figure out the next jump and that is where winning lies. Figuring out the trend early and turning it in your favour.

APRIL 2016 | FUTURE OF MOBILE MARKETING | 06

Traditional digital marketing model had remained flat, whereas the increase in quantum came from mobile.

to know where your customers are in their life journey, so you can make sure you are serving the right content to them at the right time.An example is when a customer has just concluded a very large storage deal and he is bom-barded with storage content. That just doesn’t make sense. What’s the point of sending him the content for the product he has already bought? So how do you contextualize your con-tent?

Q4. How big is the contribution of mobile in lead generation? 73% of the respon-dents were unable to measure ROI.Honestly, that is where I think overall, digital has to scale. We at Dell look at it in terms of engagement, how many im-pressions we got, what kind of audiences were there, and then we see how many leads we generated out of it. However, the intent of why you do mobile marketing is beyond lead gen-eration. We measure it on 3Rs: Reach, Relevance and ROI. It is import-

Q3. Our survey results say that 64% of companies have integrated their mobile mar-keting campaigns. How does it work for you?We make sure we have inte-grated our mobile strategy with all other marketing initiatives. Starting from optimizing our search pages for mobile, tablet and other devices, to making our emailers mobile-friendly, we take exhaustive measures to integrate our marketing initia-tives with mobile.

For me, mobile marketing is largely about serving rich me-dia content and in a way that customers would find value in.

In the last two years, rich me-dia content, which is primarily videos, has dramatically scaled. And that has led to more and more videos being created and consumed. Interestingly, the best place to serve up videos is mobile, and the best place to consume such videos also hap-pen mobile.

Customers use mobile for dif-ferent reasons. It’s important

Measuring the effectiveness of mobile marketing through demand and lead is limiting and not the right thing to do.


The propensity to learn in this medium is fantastic. I have looked at HP’s campaign and learnt from it.


ant to measure the anchors across all the three. The good thing is that all three things are going well; so our holistic approach seems to have worked.

Q5. The research says companies were unable to track the reach of mobile marketing. Is that right?No, I don’t think that should be a problem. If you look at mobile as an integral part of digital marketing execution, it’s not diffi-cult. But if you start measuring it in an isolated way, then you run into challenges like how do I define value, how much do I invest in mobile. We never had a debate on how much to invest in mobile.

Our position has always been clear: mobile is an integral part of digital and it doesn’t matter what it costs.

Q6. Our research says that not many companies are able to mine their own data. What is the challenge?For data mining to give desired results it has to be in-depth. Getting customer insights and understanding customer behav-ior should be priority from the beginning. Good thing is, at Dell we had started doing this very early. It demands a lot of time, and I am not sure if companies have that much time to spare for data mining and understanding customers. The market is very competitive today. If you wait six months to come up with a plan, you have already lost the opportunity.

Q7. When will payment get integrat-ed with mobile marketing?Sales enablement is not happening right now and it is kind of a lesser issue. But it will happen in the future. When we start, it has to be a fully-functional, all-services mobile offering. Thank-fully, this is not the year for solving this issue.

Q8. What are the new developments you see happening in the mobile marketing space?

I think a lot more full-service offerings will emerge. End-to-end services-like assisting customers in exploring, to looking for something specific, to enabling purchase-all this could happen on mobile, end to end.

Today not much interaction is happening on mobile, so that will become big. We also see augmented reality becoming big in B2B marketing, where mobile will play an integral role. We are looking at how to do that from a marketing perspective. If I have my way, I will have my own augmented reality view within three months. It’s easy to work on a small concept and get it started. But for it to be a full-fledged business, that will take at least two more years.

Using mobile to enable the sales team is another focus area that will emerge soon


The usage of mobile in B2B marketing has been on the rise over the past two years. However, the intention of using mobile as a marketing tool by B2B companies is very different from what B2C companies expect from their mobile marketing initiatives. For starters, B2B marketers do not expect direct lead generation from their mobile campaigns, as is the case in B2C marketing.

We talked to Sanjay Chaudhary, Head, Segment Marketing at a leading cloud solutions company, on the increase in use of mobile tools for marketing by B2B companies. He believes mobile marketing in B2B is more of a relationship-building activity done by engaging customers, understanding their needs and providing solutions based on that. “It’s not merely engagement with customers around transactions,” he said in an exclusive interview with Digital CMO Digest.


Q1. Why did B2B companies start late in using mobile marketing?If you see in B2B marketing, with or without mobile usage, engagement does not lead to quick purchase, as is often the case in B2C marketing. The stakes are also not as high, and there is often a personal touch involved in selling products.

Things have slowly started changing with the advent of cloud computing. With the adoption of cloud com-puting, mobile market-ing, online marketing and telephonic market-ing will increase more

in the B2B space. Mo-bile is increasingly becoming important in this space. The sheer possibility of things we can do with mobile has trig-gered its usage in the B2B space. Using mobile you can reach your customers through an app, a micro site or a QR Code. Mobile also provides you with contextualized iformation, like where the customer is, and what he is look-ing for. You can leverage this informa-tion to give them contextually-relevant content and guide them towards the right product.

Q2. Are B2B companies using these features you talked about?Retail companies are using these features much more than B2B companies. However, B2B has leveraged mobile to get more out of their events, conferences and talks. I have seen companies developing apps for events to engage attendees, share more information and other such activities.

Q3. Do you think this is the year mobile marketing will take off in full strength?

There is a lot of focus on content marketing and it will play a big role in driving mobile

marketing. It depends on companies; how they leverage this opportunity. As far as users are concerned, they are consuming more and more content on their mobile devices. The market is also changing with a lot of start-ups entering the B2B space. They are more open to pursuing newer ways of engagement, including mobile, and quick in adopting newer technologies.


Q4. But mobile does not contribute much to revenues yet...It is very difficult to generate revenue using mobile marketing for now. Unless you are doing something like an event where you can attribute your lead directly to it, you can never completely attribute the lead to a mobile strategy. There are fundamental changes that have happened in the customer’s buying journey. Customers now go online to check about the company, they go through social channels, and they follow their trusted advisors (also called industry influencers) much before they reach out to the marketing or sales team with their inquiries. As per some industry reports, buyers are almost 60% through their decision before they even talk to someone in sales. During this time, buyers form or reinforce perceptions and build loyalty toward the company.

Q5. What is it that B2B marketers are trying to achieve with mobile marketing?

Marketing teams are now not only tasked with sourcing or creating new demand but also influencing the buying process. To engage the customers and nurture them effectively (during the initial 60% of the buying cycle), marketers are leveraging mobile to send the right content at the right time in the buyer’s journey. Mobile is increasingly becoming a tool to access information and in educating the customer; to get customers to think about things differently. It has become a tool to make them realise the problem and encourage them to take the next step of looking up possible solutions.


Mobile phones, unlike any other device, blur the line between personal and professional. Increasing-ly, companies are encouraging a bring-your-own-device culture, leading to a higher proliferation of (personal) mobile usage on the job. In addition to that, internet usage through mobile is growing ex-ponentially. India is projected to have 500 million mobile users by 2017, of which 314 million will be using internet on their phones.¹ This provides an unprecedented access to B2B marketers. Unfortu-nately, it does not easily translate into success in reaching out to customers through mobile-based marketing.

When designing mobile-based communication, a marketer must acknowledge that the nature of this interaction is deeply personal. From a customer’s point-of-view, this is akin to being invited into their lives. Customers will have concerns related to their privacy, annoyance and intrusion. And, as common sense suggests, only those whom they trust will be invited.

Trust is the confidence one party (customer) has in the reliabili-ty and integrity of the other (brand). A three-country research pub-lished² in European Journal of Marketing suggests that trust in a brand improves acceptance toward the brand’s mobile communica-tion. Consumers build this trust through their personal experience or of those whom they trust. Consumers prefer to engage with brands with whom they feel comfortable sharing personal data. Mobile users

DO YOU TRUST ME? BRAND’S CREDIBILITY HERALDS SUCCESS OF ITS MOBILE MARKETINGHarsh Dadhich*


*Author is a doctorate from IIM Ahmedabad in Marketing. He is currently marketing analyst at Forbes Marshall.

Source 1: http://www.livemint.com/Industry/VThUq5I4BivpTDZdQb5sNN/Mobile-Internet-users-in-India-to-double-by-2017-says-study.html


Source 2: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/doi/abs/10.1108/03090560910935541?journalCode=ejm&

Source 3: http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0148296313002373

have safety concerns and their behaviour shows that they use the brand’s credibility as a proxy for its online behaviour.Brands that hold strong equity in the minds of customers are more likely to benefit through mobile-based marketing; they can capital-ize on existing awareness and acceptance.

Not all trust is equal

Researchers in University of Ottawa find that trust requirements vary with context. Trust in a brand becomes an even more important factor when mobile marketing cap-tures a customer’s location. The authors argue that customers may feel more vulnerable sharing their exact location. This heightens their need for reassur-ance, which can be compensated for by the credibility of the brand. Location-based marketing allows brands to push relevant information. However, if they fail to do so, customers may find it annoying or valueless. Cus-tomers prefer specific, in-context information that can reduce their effort or cost of making decisions.

Building trust

Brand building is an on-going multi-channel activ-ity, especially in B2B. Mobile marketing benefits from such activity across other channels. Within the mobile channel, a brand benefits by giving greater control to customers over their engagement. In his book Per-mission Marketing, Seth Godin argues that customers will value those brands that value customers’ need for privacy and control. A paper published3 in Journal of Business Research supports these claims. It finds that consumers have more of a positive attitude towards

mobile marketing when brands ask for their permission.

Well-executed mobile-based marketing can be of great value to a brand in the B2B space. Recognizing the customer’s need to trust in a brand allows marketers to tailor their integrated marketing plans. A combined strategy that builds brand value will aid in the success of their mobile-based initiatives. They will also gain by asking for permission and giving greater control to their customers over their engagement.

Mining Mobile MarketingVishal Tripathi, Research Director, Gartner India, talks about the challenges of mobile in B2B marketing

It’s been just a few years or so since B2B enterprises took note of the impact of mobile, and started building tools to leverage it in their marketing. The Regalix global report on mobile marketing also found that a majority of the marketers - 67% to be precise - have been using mobile marketing for less than two years. However, these companies have long been using digital marketing tools in their marketing programs.

A Gartner report says digital has become mainstream for B2B marketers with digital commerce becoming top priority for them. The report goes on to claim that the line between offline and digital marketing is merging.

Vishal Tripathi, Research Director at Gartner India says, digital is a huge word and every company has its own definition of it.

“The problem is, B2B is just starting the mobile journey when digital journey has already been embarked on by these companies. That’s not marketing, that’s more of a convenience piece fixed for the customer. “But mobile no doubt is impacting fundamental market metrics. There is a lot of mobile-first traffic coming for B2B companies, but it is also increasing the bounce rate. At the end of the day, mobile requires customer engagement,” he said.

According to Tripathi, marketers who are just starting out on their mobile marketing initiative should focus on making mobile-friendly websites, launching separate apps for partners and customers, while being on top in the search list.

Serving rich media content like how-to videos or user reviews in search results is also one of the things marketers should try to do. With the advent of Periscope and Meerkat, marketers can livestream their conferences and talks more easily on social media. In terms of putting out local mobile campaigns, Tripathi believes companies can use the mobile platform to do more for their local business partners.

However, Tripathi said, for B2B marketers, IoT would be the biggest puzzle to solve. “It is going to be a huge part of the digital marketing eco-system. There has been a lot of talk about it in India but not much work. But I believe IoT would be more successful than other technologies that people have been talking about.”


The importance of good leadership in today’s corporate environment cannot be emphasised enough. This book explains how good leadership encompasses understanding to be a good subordinate first. Gopalakrishnan highlights how accomplishment alone cannot suffice to be a good subordinate. He talks about the 4 A’s that operate together to help achieve success – Accomplishment, Affability, Advocacy and Authenticity. The book showcases very powerful and impactful case studies, helping the reader visualize the concept put forward by the author in a clearer and more practical manner.

Arun Pattabhiramam, the VP and Head of Marketing at InMobi, talks about three books that he has recently read. Highly different from each other, Arun talks about the business insights he drew from each of them.

– R Gopalakrishnan

What the CEO really wants from you – Eric Schmidt,

Jonathan Roseberg

How Google Works

Google is a company that has touched the lives of almost everyone with an internet connection. So what makes Google tick? This book shows me that there are lots to learn about how to drive strategy, innovation and talent management. Every few pages there is a valuable nugget of information which can help a leader re-think strategy in a more ground-up manner. Even though the title might suggest insights into the technical aspects of Google’s products, in actu-ality the book focuses on a deeper and more important part of the company: the culture, talent management, decision-making and innova-tion in the organization.

– Devdutt Pattanaik

Jaya

This is a book based on the major Sanskrit epic of India: The Mahabharata. In his re-telling, Devdutt highlights the brilliance of the epic by skimming over the dreary details and infusing it with many folk and regional variants. The book offers more than just a mythological account of the story. There are several parallels one can make to the business scenarios of today and glean insights from the book. Devdutt has a refreshingly unique outlook to many scenarios, which makes this book a worthwhile read even to a person with a thorough knowledge of the original epic.


BOOK CORNER

www.regalix.com

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